Sedona Wednesday

It's my birthday and the sun came out!

We were patient and good natured about the rainy days, and I think we made good use of them, but let’s face it: we came to Sedona to be outside in the sun. Today’s sunshine charged our batteries and we charged off into a full (perhaps over-full?) day of birthday activities, starting with all three of us taking Lynn’s advice to go for a walk around the Centennial trail in the Cultural park area to get lots of beautiful morning views.

It was still sunny when we got back, and we were all itching to get near some of the big red rocks, so we headed out for the Bell Rock loop. Sedona in the rain and snow is kind of cool, because the red rocks are realllly red, and you get to hike along bubbling streams, but Sedona in the sun is what it’s about. The hike was just what I wanted, with lots of good views and walking on the slickrock and surprisingly little mud compared to the day before. There’s a spur trail that goes higher up on the bell, which is in our list of things we wanted to do but didn’t.

Once we finished the hike we were actually hungry (a rarity in Sedona), and since Shorebird was on our way back to the Sedona Summit (have I mentioned that’s the name of where we’re staying?) we stopped there, only to find that google was wrong and they were still not open for lunch. Across the street is a restaurant called Hdeaway House, “curious country Italian food”. I’d been curious about their curious food since last year and had checked out the menu online and it looked ok. So we went there. It has beautiful views and many levels of outdoor dining, but the food was, like Creekside, just ok. Lynn didn’t care for her soup and salad, but fortunately Dave’s sandwich was big enough for two. I had the polenta with roasted vegetables which was presented with three asparagus spears standing up like a teepee, held at the top with an ring of onion. The veggies were not quite as roasted as one might have liked but I definitely won the meal.

Back to the resort for a quick stop to change out of our muddy pants and we were off again, this time towards the town of Jerome. We stopped on the way for a Karen-suggested hike around the Cliffrose trail outside of Cottonwood – an interesting hike on flat open country along a shallow canyon with interesting crumbling rock sides. Next stop was Tuzigoot national monument, an early pueblo settlement built on the top of a hill.

 Lynn and I both got our permanent senior passes there – after all, it was my 62^nd birthday – and we all enjoyed walking around the area. We were amused by the plant signs, because by some sheer stroke of luck many different native species just happened to be growing, evenly spaced, between the parking lot and the visitor’s center.

Are you exhausted yet? We’d hoped for a stop at the mining museum, but it was too late to go in when we got there, although we did get to see the Audrey Headframe. We continued on up into Jerome, where we finally got to go to the kaleidoscope store, which is so full of fabulous things we could have stayed there all day. I got a small kaleidoscope and Lynn got some rainbow colored bird scissors. They had the most wonderful rube goldberg mechanisms for turning light switches on and off, and a lamp made from a saxophone, and of course the birthday hat.

We visited one more store and then we were ready to eat, delicious burgers at the Haunted Hamburger, where you can sub onion rings for your side but not fried artichokes, which is why we had fried artichokes for an appetizer. The sky wasn’t quite right for a fabulous sunset, but we enjoyed looking out over the valley as the sun went down. We were home pretty early and had time to learn how to play “Azul”, a game that Lynn brought. I liked it but was very bad at it! We played two rounds (Lynn won one, Dave won one by one point) and then we were so exhausted we had to go sit on the couch.

Things to do at the Haunted Hamburger

A moment here to talk about the couch – in our first apartment we had a big comfy couch with two comfy chairs; in this one the couch is a smaller hide-a-bed with only one comfy chair. The couch may be the most uncomfortable couch ever, with cushions that are designed to slide off as you sit on them. Lynn discovered that you can turn them around and they don’t slide anymore (they do look ugly, though) and we brought out extra pillows from the other beds to add some back support and it all worked out fine.